October 27, 2017, 09:12:57 AM

Today the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign committee violated campaign finance law by failing to accurately disclose the purpose and recipient of payments for the dossier of research alleging connections between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia. The CLC's complaint asserts that by effectively hiding these payments from public scrutiny the DNC and Clinton "undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures."

On October 24, The Washington Post revealed that the DNC and Hillary for America paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig into Trump's Russia ties, but routed the money through the law firm Perkins Coie and described the purpose as "legal services" on their FEC reports rather than research. By law, campaign and party committees must disclose the reason money is spent and its recipient.

"By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures," said Adav Noti, senior director, trial litigation and strategy at CLC, who previously served as the FEC's Associate General Counsel for Policy. "Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money. The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action."

"Questions about who paid for this dossier are the subject of intense public interest, and this is precisely the information that FEC reports are supposed to provide," said Brendan Fischer, director, federal and FEC reform at CLC. "Payments by a campaign or party committee to an opposition research firm are legal, as long as those payments are accurately disclosed. But describing payments for opposition research as 'legal services' is entirely misleading and subverts the reporting requirements."

While details of the payment arrangements remain scarce, FEC records indicate that the Hillary campaign and the DNC paid a total of $12 million to Perkins Coie for "legal services." Marc Elias, a Perkins partner and general counsel for Hillary's campaign, then used some portion of those funds to turn around and hire Fusion GPS who then contracted with a former British spy, Christopher Steele, to compile the now-infamous dossier. Per the Daily Caller:

Is The Mueller Special Investigation Going To Result In A Massive Political Explosion...Over Nearly Nothing?

The Daily WireBy Ben ShapiroDecember 1, 2017

While the mainstream media projects that former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn's guilty plea in lying to the FBI presages the possibility that the case of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government will break wide open, there's another possibility: that special counsel Robert Mueller is about to unleash a wave of minor charges with no underlying crimes.

Here's how.

Flynn's plea deal suggests that his crime was lying to the FBI about conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak -- after the election. Supposedly, Flynn spoke with Kislyak about backing off of retaliation against Obama administration sanctions, and also about delaying a late-Obama administration United Nations resolution designed to condemn Israeli settlements. It's completely unclear why Flynn would lie about such conversations; they weren't illegal. In fact, most Americans would want the transition team to talk to foreign governments about the policy to be implemented in mere weeks.

But Flynn apparently lied, and now admits to it.

That means that Flynn will be testifying against other members of the administration who supposedly told him to speak with Kislyak. Speculation suggests that the top official was Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. But so what? Kushner committed no crime in telling Flynn to reach out to the Russians in order to quash bad Obama policy, particularly on Israel.

Unless Kushner fibbed to the FBI too, for some unspecified reason.

One reason could be simple inexperience. It's possible that Flynn and that unspecified upper-echelon official simply didn't know it wasn't a problem to speak with Kislyak. It's possible that they did it without the permission of Trump. Incompetence is always a more obvious answer than malice when it comes to the administration.

But if that upper-echelon official lied to the FBI, Mueller could charge him along the same lines as the charges against Flynn, hoping to ensnare further officials in a chain of lies about contacts with the Russian government that (a) weren't illegal and (b ) were post-election.

This sets off the distinct possibility of a bevy of legal charges based on untruth, but with no underlying crime. This wouldn't be about collusion or election-rigging, but about ensnaring Trump administration officials in their own words. It would look less like Watergate, and much more like the political prosecution of Scooter Libby, the assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was prosecuted by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for supposedly lying about a phone call with Tim Russert -- even though the underlying investigation centered on Richard Armitage leaking CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the media. President Bush ended up commuting Libby's sentence.

It has come to light that as director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, who is currently the special counsel looking for any dirt he can find on Donald Trump, presided over the 2012 removal of all counterterror training materials of any mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism. Since then, our law enforcement and intelligence officials have been blundering along in self-imposed darkness about the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat. This, it turns out, was Mueller's doing.

In February 2012, the Obama Administration purged more than one thousand documents and presentations from counter-terror training material for the FBI and other agencies. This material was discarded at the demand of Muslim groups, which had deemed it inaccurate or offensive to Muslims.

This purge was several years in the making, and I was - inadvertently - the one who touched it off. In August 2010, when I gave a talk on Islam and jihad to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force -- one of many such talks I gave to government agencies and military groups in those years. While some had counseled me to keep these talks quiet so as to avoid attracting the ire of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the possibility of that pressure seemed to me to make it all the more important to announce my appearances publicly, so as to show that the U.S. government was not going to take dictation from a group linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Those who had urged silence were proven correct, however, for the Obama administration was indeed disposed to take dictation from CAIR. CAIR sent a series of letters to Mueller and others demanding that I be dropped as a counter-terror trainer; the organization even started a "coalition" echoing this demand, and Jesse Jackson and other Leftist luminaries joined it.

At the FBI, Mueller made no public comment on CAIR's demand, and so it initially appeared that CAIR's effort had failed. But I was never again invited to provide counter-terror training for any government agency, after having done so fairly regularly for the previous five years. CAIR's campaign to keep me from taking part in counter-terror training was, of course, not personal. They targeted me simply because I told the truth, just as they would target anyone else who dared do so.

Although Mueller was publicly silent, now we know that he was not unresponsive. And the Islamic supremacists and their Leftist allies didn't give up. In the summer and fall of 2011, the online tech journal Wired published several "exposés" by far-Left journalist Spencer Ackerman, who took the FBI to task for training material that spoke forthrightly and truthfully about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.

In a typical sally from one of these exposés, Ackerman condemned the training material for intimating that mainstream American Muslims were "likely to be terrorist sympathizers." Certainly all the mainstream Muslim organizations condemn al-Qaeda and 9/11; however, as we have seen, some of the foremost of those organizations, such as ISNA, MAS, ICNA, the MSA, CAIR, and others, have links of various kinds to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. A mainstream Muslim spokesman in the U.S., Ground Zero Mosque Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, refused to condemn Hamas until it became too politically damaging for him not to do so; another, CAIR's Nihad Awad, openly declared his support for Hamas in 1994. Other mainstream Muslim spokesmen in the U.S., such as Obama's ambassador to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Rashad Hussain, and media gadfly Hussein Ibish, have praised and defended Sami al-Arian, the confessed leader of another jihad terror group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Do these men and organizations represent a tiny minority of extremists that actually does not express the opinions of the broad mainstream of Muslims in this country? Maybe, but there simply are no counterparts -- no individuals of comparable influence or groups of comparable size -- that have not expressed sympathy for some Islamic terror group.

Nonetheless, in the face of Ackerman's reports, the FBI went into full retreat. In September 2011 it announced that it was dropping one of the programs that Ackerman had zeroed in on.